Music In The Mountains: Deep In The Heart Of Colombia’s “Sistema”

“In the words of its director, Juan Antonio Cuellar, ‘Social action is the mission; music is the tool.’ Cuellar describes taking a plane across a remote area of the Andes, driving to the end of the only road, taking a boat to a small town … and finding the children singing songs and working in recorder ensembles exactly as they do in downtown Bogotá.”

In Order To Get It Right, Get It Wrong – A Whole Heck Of A Lot

“The students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class.”